A study of the importance of different religious, ethnic and political social identities in Northern Ireland surveyed 991 young people, 60 percent of whom were Protestants and 40 percent of whom were Catholics, on their choices among different bipolar adjectives, after which they were asked to rank order the terms. It is shown that the Protestant-Catholic dimension is the most often chosen and the most highly rated ethnopolitical category, but that some cross-cutting occurs in all categories. It is also shown that the term ‘Protestant’ is more clearly thought of as strictly an ethnopolitical term than ‘Catholic’, which carries meaning apart from what could be considered strictly religious.
